If you used the SUSE Cloud 3 OpenStack Admin Appliance, you know it was a downloadable, OpenStack Havana-based appliance, which even a non-technical user could get off the ground to deploy an OpenStack cloud. Today, I am excited to tell you about the new Icehouse-based SUSE Cloud 4 OpenStack Admin Appliance.

With that initial SUSE Cloud 3 release, there were two versions: Standard and Embedded. After feedback from users it was clear that the user experience was not much different between the two, and the important goal was to reduce the overall size of the download. To address the situation, I came up with some innovations that led to a single, smaller image that incorporates the functionality of both the Standard and Embedded versions.

The new appliance incorporates all of the needed software and repositories to set up, stage and deploy OpenStack Icehouse in your sandbox lab, or production environments. Coupled with it are the added benefits of automated deployment of highly available cloud services, support for mixed-hypervisor clouds containing KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, support from our award-winning, worldwide service organization and integration with SUSE Engineered maintenance processes. In addition, there is integration with tools such as SUSE Studio™ and SUSE Manager to help you build and manage your cloud applications.

With the availability of SUSE Cloud 4, and based on feedback from partners, vendors and customers deploying OpenStack, it was time to release a new and improved Admin Appliance. This new image incorporates the most common use cases and is flexible enough to add in other components such as SMT (Subscription Management Tool) and SUSE Customer Center registration, so you can keep your cloud infrastructure updated.

The creation of the SUSE Cloud 4 OpenStack Admin Appliance is intended to provide a quick and easy deployment. The partners and vendors we are working with find it useful to quickly test their applications in SUSE Cloud and validate their use case. For customers it has become a great tool for deploying production private clouds based on OpenStack.

With version 4.0.x you can proceed with the following to get moving now with OpenStack.

Its important that you start by reading and understanding the Deployment Guide before proceeding. This will give you some insight into the requirements and an overall understanding of what is involved to deploy your own private cloud.
See the SUSE Cloud 4 Deployment Guide

As a companion to the Deployment Guide we have provided a questionnaire that will help you answer and organize the critical steps talked about in the Deployment Guide.
See the SUSE Cloud Questionnaire

Changes from Github Project
– This version contains the GM version of SUSE Cloud 4 and any updates to this date
– Prepare source for SUSE Cloud 4 media and requirements
– Added proxy as a module in the firstboot phase
– Added HA patches
– Replaced lamp_server pattern with SMT server pattern, so SMT is now integrated
– Added ability to grab SMT repos from external USB drive source. Inherent now with the image
– Added ability to attach to remote SMT. Inherent now with the image
– Reformatted the SLES 11 SP3 update repo into a mini formatted repo
– Redesigned firstboot
– Removed build repos from appliance after build phase

Now is the time. Go out to http://www.suse.com/suse-cloud-appliances and start downloading version 4, walk through the Appliance Guide, and see how quick and easy it can be to set up OpenStack. Don’t stop there. Make it highly available and set up more than one hypervisor, and don’t forget to have a lot of fun.

Enjoy!

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Disclaimer: As with everything else in the SUSE Blog, this content is definitely not supported by SUSE (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up). It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.